Bzrk Apocalypse (19 page)

It could be a way to determine his loyalty. If he found—

She cut herself off in midthought as reality dawned: there was

no way to determine loyalty. Ever. Keats might be loyal today and

some nano creature of either side might be wiring him to switch sides

tomorrow.

“It’s still inside me,” she said. “Maybe it’s trapped in my liver or

whatever, but it’s still in me.” She nodded and wiped her mouth, then

set her plate in the sink. “Yes,” she said decisively. “The aneurysm will

keep. Help me look for wire. I want to know where it all is. And help

me kill this thing, whatever and whoever it is.”

“And pull the wire?”

She didn’t answer. She didn’t answer for so long that Keats

thought she must not have heard him.

“And pull the wire?” he repeated, more insistently this time.

She shook her head. “Not yet, Noah.”

After that she wouldn’t look at him.

The other person making an interesting discovery was Imelda Suarez.

Lieutenant
Imelda Suarez, dammit. Hopefully there was an extra

paycheck to come with that.

154

BZRK APOCALYPSE

The
Celadon
, the mother ship, had dropped anchor six miles out

from Cathexis Base, hundreds of miles from McMurdo. The ice was

thick and crusty here, and no way the ship could edge up to the dock,

not for another month at least. She had gone ashore in the
Jade Mon-

key
, running easily up onto the beach and roaring along until the

LCAC found its home, a hangar and refit facility they all called the

Blower Barn.

As soon as she’d done the inevitable paperwork, Suarez headed

toward the Office—the administrative building. Things at Cathexis

Base tended to be named simply, usually by function, but with an

occasional touch of wit: the Blower Barn, the Chiller (a poorly heated

dorm), the Toasty (the newer, warmer dorm), the Club, the Link (the

satellite dishes), the Office.

In the center of the base, acting as a sort of central park, was

a glass dome raised up on a skid-mounted platform. It was seldom

transparent—condensation saw to that—but it clearly housed green,

living things, ranging from small elm trees to tall grasses to irises

and roses. But for the most part the Andalite Dome, or AD, as it was

called for some obscure reason, was more practically planted with

cabbages, broccoli, romaine lettuce, carrots, and onions.

The produce wasn’t anything like enough even to feed Cathexis

Base, but it helped, and it was the place to go when you felt the ice

start to close in on you.

As Suarez did now. Seeing the smudge of green inside the sweat-

dripping bubble, she felt herself drawn to it, and decided checking in

at the Office could wait. Getting into the dome was a process—you

had to shed your gear and walk in wearing T-shirt and pants alone.

And you had to pass through a double airlock.

155

MICHAEL GRANT

It was while in the airlock that she ran into Charlie Bronk.

“Coming or going?” he asked her.

“Just got in,” she said. Bronk was a small man with a too-tough

name. He was a mechanic who often worked with Suarez. They

weren’t friends, but they were cordial.

“I’m supposed to head out to Forward Green,” he said. “One of

their cats is wonky, needs a new fuel injector.”

“There’s no one out there can do it?”

Bronk laughed. “At Forward Green? Pff. Those are scientists and

God knows what all out there. Sally Wills is the only one can turn

a screwdriver, and she’s on an evac to Wellington.” He lowered his

voice. “A psych thing. She lost her shit.”

“Damn. Sally Wills? The redhead?”

Bronk nodded. “I don’t suppose . . . I mean, I wouldn’t ask, but it’s

my son’s bar mitzvah and I’m missing it. I was going to Skype.”

“You can’t Skype from Forward Green?”

“There’s no communication in or out of Forward except to here.

Security.”

She was on the verge of asking him why there would be secrecy,

but thought better of it. That was the kind of question that might be

thrown in your face some day if there was a problem. Cathexis Inc.

might not be military, but when it came to secrecy, they sometimes

went the military one better.

“I could do it,” Suarez said with a shrug. “Of course you’ll owe

me. And I don’t mean you cover for me on cleanup. I mean something

more like you pull a shift. Three shifts.”

They agreed on one shift and a round of clean-up duty. And that

156

BZRK APOCALYPSE

was how Suarez ended up on a loud chopper heading almost due

south. It was a hellish ride. The wind had come up. In fact, at the

halfway point the pilots discussed turning back. Antarctic weather

wasn’t something you took risks with.

But satellite imagery gave them a nominally clear hour before the

hammer came down, so they went forward.

If Cathexis Base was businesslike and humane, Forward Green

was a bizarre cross between survivalist compound and Ritz-Carlton

resort. From the frosty window of the chopper she could see that the

buildings were arranged in a sort of diamond around what was very

certainly the only swimming pool on the continent. The pool was

covered of course, and as sweaty as the Andalite Dome at Cathexis

Base. It was an ostentatious symbol of wealth, because water—actual,

liquid water—was one of the rarest and most expensive of com-

modities. It spoke of a profligate use of power—the heat to keep the

pool warm, the light to make it shine, the lift capacity to bring it all

together in this place.

It was built above ground, of course—the shifting ice would have

crushed anything cut into it. It was covered by a plastic roof that

formed three peaks, vaguely reminiscent of the Sydney Opera House.

Suarez guessed that the power source had to be a nuclear reactor.

But how had that been approved? The green movement had made

peace with nuclear power, but here? On the
ice
? And in private hands?

Once she’d looked beyond that eye-popping artifact of another

world, Suarez took in the rest of the place. The buildings were iden-

tical—seven three-story ski-mounted structures, with an empty slot

where an eighth building might go someday.

157

MICHAEL GRANT

The windows aimed out toward the ice were small, with metal-

lic shutters that could be mechanically closed against the wind. The

windows facing in, toward the pool, were larger than anything she’d

ever seen before in energy-conscious Antarctica. Though they, too,

were equipped with strong steel shutters.

She imagined what the place would look like locked down, with

all those shutters closed. And then she noticed the four half-buried

towers two hundred yards out from each point on the diamond.

“I’ll be damned if those aren’t gun emplacements,” she muttered.

Not that she saw anything like weapons.

A mile away to the south and barely visible because the wind was

now blowing crystals of ice through the air was a larger structure—

long, low, and unadorned—that could only be some sort of hangar.

That’s where the souped-up hovercraft would be.

It hit her then full force: they didn’t have anyone who could fix a

fuel injector? At a facility where they were building jet-powered hov-

ercraft? Bullshit.

She hadn’t cleverly exploited an opening to reach Forward Green:

she’d been lured there.

Lystra and Bug Man left Stockholm not by way of Arlanda Airport

but by car, to a private airfield fifty miles out of town, out into the

landscape of snow and dark pine trees.

Bug Man had only a light parka that George had supplied, in

no way sufficient to deal with a Swedish winter. The run from the

car to the welcoming light of the jet was enough to freeze him, but

Lystra seemed indifferent, still wearing her blood-drenched red

158

BZRK APOCALYPSE

dress—though she had swapped her shoes for a pair of shearling

boots.
She would look almost cute
, Bug Man thought,
if she were

younger. And a whole lot less insane.

It was warm on the plane, which took off within minutes of the

door closing, soaring up into the night.

“Look!” Lystra said, and drew him out of his seat to look through

the window on her side.

The sky was an eerie light show, green against black, the stars all

rendered irrelevant. The green was a veil, translucent, shimmering.

“Aurora borealis,” Lystra said. “The northern lights.” She nod-

ded. “We get them in the south sometimes, too. You’ll see.”

Bug Man watched for a while, acutely aware of her nearness.

Crazy, yes. Too old for him, yes. Still . . .

She must have sensed it because she laughed, an almost girlish

sound, and pushed him back to his seat.

But then she stood up, turned her back to him, and said, “Help

me with the zipper.”

Bug Man swallowed hard. Okay, yes, he’d thought about it. But

seriously? With a woman who had his sanity and life in her hands?

He’d watched the TV as instructed, and he had seen the Nobel mad-

ness. He had even seen a fleeting shot of Lystra dancing and twirling

away from the carnage.

God only knew what the woman would do to him if he disap-

pointed her.

He drew the zipper down. It snagged halfway and he had to tug at

it for a bit, all the while with his nose just inches from her back.

Most of what he could see was tattooed. Blues and reds and

159

MICHAEL GRANT

greens. He couldn’t make out the patterns, except that most of it

seemed to be faces. He saw eyes staring, mouths twisted in screams.

“Damn,” he whispered, and winced, hoping she hadn’t heard.

“You like my ink?”

“Uh, yeah,” he said too quickly.

“Want to see more? Want to see my latest one?”

He froze. Just absolutely froze. She let her dress fall to the floor.

“Oh . . . shit,” he said. There were faces on her back, on her behind,

on her flanks. Not every inch was covered—maybe half of the avail-

able flesh.

More than enough. It was a horror show.

Faces. Men, women, one that might even be a child. All in agony

or rage or some combination of the two.

He couldn’t breathe. He did not want to see more. He did not

want her to turn around.

But she did.

Slowly, slowly; savoring his fear, the fear she could hear in his

raspy breathing, in the way it caught in his throat.

Her front was even more horrific. Faces from hell were staring

out at him. Two were new, still healing.

She pointed to the freshest-looking one with a coyly bent finger.

She was being cute. She was playing with him. But oh, God, there was

no way to fake this, no way for him to force his features into anything

like a pleasing expression.

“That’s a man named Janklow. He didn’t want to sell me his

medical testing company. Because of him, yeah, the whole game was

delayed.”

Her breasts were just inches from him. Her eyes were the eyes of

160

BZRK APOCALYPSE

a rabid dog, focused on him with an intensity that made him tremble.

“Don’t you want to know who they all are?” she asked, and the

hard, sadistic voice he’d heard before had replaced the cute come-

hither tone.

He managed to shake his head. No. He didn’t have a single ques-

tion. No, he didn’t want to know. He wanted to be back in England.

He wanted to be back at Tesco, shopping for his mother’s onions. His

fists were clenched so tight they ached.

“Sure, you want to know,” she said. “These are all the ones whose

lives I have taken from them.”

“That actress? Do you remember, yeah? You must have read

about it, seen it on TV? She dug her own eyes out with a knife. It was

intense, Bug Man, very intense.” She tapped the other still-healing tat,

on her sculpted hip bone. America’s Sweetheart in blue ink, bleeding

red blood from her gouged eyes.

“What did she—”

“What did she do? Oh, she wouldn’t even remember, didn’t rec-

ognize me at all, why would she? I was in a hospital for a while for . .

. stress?” She threw her head back and laughed. “Stress? I was crazy

as a loon.”

Was? Paste tense?
Bug Man wanted to ask. But not as much as he

wanted to go on living.

“My pap and mam, that’s what they had me call them. My guard-

ians.” She spit the word. “The losers my daddy dumped me on. They

started talking to me after I killed them.” She covered each breast

with a hand, lifted them slightly so he could see the faces tattooed

there. They appeared to have been crushed. Their eyes were . . .

“They would talk to me. ‘Be a good girl, Lyssie. Pray to the Lord

161

MICHAEL GRANT

for strength, Lyssie.’ Sometimes though, they would give me useful

business advice.” She frowned at the memory, then thankfully she

turned away, walked to a narrow closet, and pulled out jeans and a

sweatshirt. The sweatshirt was green with a big letter
C
over an out-

line of Antarctica.

Bug Man breathed a shaky sigh of relief. Ugly sweatshirt, but so